Japan refuses to pay individual Korean victims of colonial era

Seoul - Japan's Foreign Affairs Ministry said Thursday that it would make no reparations to Korean individuals who suffered under its colonial rule, contradicting a 1965 document, a news report said. The 1965 document, recently declassified by the ministry and obtained at the weekend by South Korean media, said Tokyo believed that Korean forced laborers or conscripts were eligible to seek compensation as individuals.

However, the ministry told South Korea's Yonhap News Agency Thursday that it was unclear what the newly declassified internal ministry document referred to.

Under Japanese colonial rule from 1910 to 1945, thousands of Koreans were forced to work to support Japan's war effort in jobs that ranged from serving on the front lines to being abused as sex slaves for the military.

A bilateral treaty between South Korea and Japan in 1965 established diplomatic ties between the two nations, which included what Tokyo said is remuneration for unpaid wages to forced laborers.

In the declassified document, Japan acknowledged that the 1965 pact only covered government-level compensation, not individuals' claims.

"This document shows the Japanese government's thoughts when the South Korea-Japan pact was established," Choi Bong Tae, a lawyer for the victims, was quoted as saying by Yonhap. "Japan should make public all diplomatic documents on negotiations for the [1965] Treaty of Basic Relations between South Korea and Japan."

Japan's Foreign Affairs Ministry has long claimed that the treaty resolved all compensation issues, Dr Chung Chin Sung, an advisory committee member of the Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan, told the German Press Agency dpa.

Individuals' claims would be rejected even if lawsuits are filed, the ministry told Yonhap, stating for the first time since 1992 its position on individual colonial victims' compensation to South Korean media.

This latest diplomatic hubbub brings into sharp relief a case from December in which seven South Korean women were paid 99 yen (about 1 dollar) for nearly a decade's worth of forced labor.

"At least this time they admitted that they have legal responsibility," Chung told dpa in December.

This year is an important one in the two countries' relations as 2010 marks the 100th anniversary of Japan's annexation of Korea.

Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama had told South Korean President Lee Myung Bak that he, unlike his predecessors, had the courage to address their countries' painful history.

Source: Earth Times.
Link: http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/314664,japan-refuses-to-pay-individual-korean-victims-of-colonial-era.html.